The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a low-cost, centrally-managed computer devoid of CD-ROM players, diskette drives, and expansion slots, a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer (its server) to fulfill its computational roles. This is different from the traditional fat client, which is a fully equipped computer designed to perform all its functionalities by itself. The specific roles assumed by the server may vary, from providing data persistence (for example, for diskless nodes) to actual information processing on the client's behalf.
Thin clients occur as components of a broader computer infrastructure, where many thin clients connect to a server through a network or a cloud, and share their computations and other functionalities with the same server. In a small scale deployment, 10 to 20 thin clients can be networked and connected to a server. In this case, the thin clients can be managed in a stand alone mode. However, in a large scale deployment, 50 to 100 thin clients can also be networked together to form a large thin client network. However, it would be difficult to manage all these thin clients in a stand alone mode. It is necessary to manage the large number of thin clients in a managed mode. Therefore, it is desirable to have a centralized thin client management software at the server that can provision, configure, control and manage all these thin clients connected to the server.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.